. . . or at least the TRIZ Matrix

I’m a suspicious sort of person. Not the black-coat-and-homburg-hat lurking in the shadows, but not always believing in the ‘truths’ of others. It may make things a bit slow at first, but if you can get down to the basics it often makes it easier to understand the development of the concepts.

So it was with TRIZ – for me at any rate. I had to develop a course to teach it to engineering Masters students. I worked out that the Matrix (you know . . . ) was based in some way on a triangle. Probably thesis–antithesis–synthesis. But I didn’t understand how – or why – ir worked.

I was fortunate in having a couple of Russians working with me – chosen because they were a rare combination of trained TRIZniks and biologists. Actually they heard about my project of trying to use TRIZ to bridge the gap between biology and engineering, and introduced themselves.

One day I discovered that the thesis–antithesis–synthesis thingy was something to do with Hegel and philosophy. I rushed down to the research lab and asked if they knew anything abount Hegel, because he seemed important to TRIZ. They said “Of course, what do you want to know?” I was surprised; further questioning revealed that Hegel and the thesis–antithesis–synthesis link-up was taught in primary schools in Russia. There was surprise that it’s not taught in the UK – at all.

I left it at that until I retired and started work with the ontology. At first I was comparing my identification of thesis–antithesis–synthesis (where the synthesis is the Inventive Principles) derived from biology with the TRIZ matrix. I was surprised to find that quite often I would find two correlations from the matrix with one of my biological definitions. It was some months later that I realised that this indicated that the idea that the Matrix was based on an uneven pairing (i.e. “What I want” vs “What is stopping me”) of the Parameters was self-evidently untrue. The TRIZ matrix is full of symmetrical trade-offs. Half of them are. So the Matrix is based on false use of data.

Now I know . . . Hegel was working with the dialectic, which can be traced back to Sophocles in ancient Greece. In the 19th century Marx and Engels got caught up in the idea that the dialectic could help to analyse and model problems in society. A reasonable but naive assumption. Marx went on to postulate dialectical materialism, an asymmetric form of the dialectic, which was taken up by Lenin and became one of the cornerstones of Communist ideology and theory. So much so that it’s taught in Russian (==USSR-as was)) primary schools where it’s used in the way Marx did. To help solve problems. There are books (in Russian) to teach this to primary school students.

So that’s where the first part of TRIZ came from. Primary school. And that answered the basic problem that had been troubling me. Why was TRIZ ‘invented’ in Russia and nowhere else? Answer – Altshuller went back to primary school, and it was all there. But it was WRONG! Trade-offs (considered a weak definition of a problem in Russia) are symmetrical. And it’s important that they are.

Because the other thing you don’t know in a trade-off is which side of the trade-off is better when external conditions are changing. Dialectical materialism can’t adapt.